Corroded

knew it. Unfortunately, I had no choice. “Collector’s business, gents,” I said quietly. I watched Dicker’s reptilian eyes widen some; his mate did not appear impressed. “You want to let us pass, you do.”

“Tchaw.” A scornful sound from the short one. “Ain’t no collector here.”

Leather creaked behind me. I wanted to reach back, seize Maddie Ruth’s arm to hold her still, but I feared losing my tenuous control of this volatile situation.

Dicker hesitated for only a breath before rolling his lanky shoulders. The blade he toyed with winked in the murky daylight. “Right. ‘And over the lot, and maybe we leave the bird alone.”

Laughable. Of all the gangs—the Brick Street Bakers, the West End Militia, the Hackney Horribles, and still more rising and falling season to season—it was the Black Fish Ferrymen known to be among the worst of them. My own run-in with them had proven they weren’t likely to let a bit of skirt wander away without at least a foray into humiliation. As cross as I was with Maddie Ruth, I did not wish her harmed.

I allowed myself a short sigh, annoyance clear as a whip crack in the alley’s echoes. “Have it your way,” I said, and took a small step-forward—weight on the balls of my feet, hands held loosely in preparation for anything they threw at me.

Leather creaked loudly. Maddie Ruth called, “Duck, please!”

The men looked from me to the very person I was trying to protect, undoing my bravado with a simple, girlish command.

I rounded on her, exasperation so great that I presented my back to the Ferrymen.

Only to glimpse a thing of copper and brass hoisted in the shorter girl’s hands, a wide tube and what looked to be vents of some kind carved into the brass facing. It was ugly, unwieldy, held up by leather and facing me.

I dropped to the mucky street just as Maddie Ruth’s finger depressed the trigger. Air vented, there was a dull thoop as I’d never heard before, and as at least one set of footsteps pattered behind me, I felt a breeze wobble my hat askew.

I turned to my back on the pitted cobble, open-mouthed with shock. A long dark tube unfolded in mid-air, spread into a net of woven rope silkier than any flax twist usually seen. Uncurling until it looked to be a spider’s web, with weights attached to each point, it sailed through the damp with startling ease. IIt slapped into Dicker— whose ire earned him the arguable honor of being first taken down by the netting. The weights yanked him backward, yelling all the way, and slammed him into his mate, who yelped in pain as the same weights wrapped tight around him and likely clobbered whatever bits of skull and flesh they found.

I watched this unfold as if in a dream, not quite certain if I’d managed to walk into an opium fantasy or not.

Certainly what little I’d imbibed would not affect me quite so obviously.

The men tumbled, a tangle of netted limbs, and Maddie Ruth grasped my shoulder. “I can’t reload here,” she said breathlessly.

I looked up at her, my eyes wide. “Maddie Ruth,” I said, certain of nothing but this, “you and I shall talk again.”

“Aye, as you say,” she said hurriedly, her gaze flicking now to the deeper alley where shouts now bounced in reply to the tangled Ferrymen. She shouldered the weapon the leather straps had been securing, once more placing it upon her back. “I think there’s more coming. What do we do?”

Of course there was more. Hadn’t I thought so?

I allowed myself a small smile as I stood. “Now you do exactly as I say,” I told her, and pointed up. “Do you see the line just above us?”

“The wash line?” She looked up, fear and excitement combining to give her a blotchy sort of wash. Her brown eyes were too wide, but sparkling.

I knew that confusion. The rush of victory replete with the knowledge that such victories would be short- lived if things went poorly. I had often made my own choices upon such a balance.

“Step on my hands,” I told her. “Grasp the line and stand upon it, then reach for the ledge just above that.”

Her mouth gaped. “I can’t!”

“‘Tis easier than it sounds, you know.”

“Is not!”

Frustration filled me. “For the love of all that is holy, Maddie Ruth, you will be the death of one of us.” I spat this out on a muttered tide of aggravation as I surveyed the wash line, the ledge of the wall just above. “Stay here.”

“But—”

“Do as I say, girl!”

Authority, as they say, is not the measure of whether others are willing to obey, but the confidence that they will do so whether they wish to or not. It is a thing ingrained in one, and often displayed by those who sit among the peerage.

I was not truly Society, not in the way my late husband had been, but I had spent countless hours among them, learning to shape my words as a weapon and my demeanor as armor.

Maddie Ruth bore no chance. Too young, I think. Too uncertain.

She shut her mouth, pressing herself back against the crumbling wall as if she could disappear into it.

The alley now echoed with the hue and cry of men, and the Ferrymen swore wildly, angrily. Rather uncreatively, to be honest. I’d heard them all already.

Measuring the distance between the alley walls with my gaze, I processed my plan as quickly as I dared and launched myself at the first wall. “Allez hop,” I grunted, just as my feet found purchase on the rough surface and propelled me towards the other. Like a grubby frog, I jumped from wall to wall, climbing with the grace of the acrobat I used to be until the wash line—a useless bit of rope that was not meant for laundering at all—was within reach.

My knees ached with the effort, and my body would not thank me after. Had I paused to consider the foolishness of this maneuver, I don’t know that I would have maintained the momentum to climb this way, but the skills shaped by mostly forgotten childhood are not so easily dismissed. On the final leap, as if by rote, my arms extended on the last spring, my fingers found the rope, and I allowed my momentum to carry my weight once forward, once backward. Another forward, and this time, I curled my body up, pulled my legs in, and landed squarely atop the rope as if it were a bar and I the tightrope walker atop it.

The loose support made certain of my awkward balance, and it took me precious seconds to regain sure footing.

“God in heaven,” Maddie Ruth groaned from the street below.

Not for me, I was sure. Up here, I could see the eddies of day lit vapor tossing about as more of the Ferrymen hurried to find us.

“Let us go!” roared the stocky man, wriggling like the fish his crew was named after. “Cut us loose, damn it!”

Why they were so plentiful in Ratcliffe would be a mystery to suss out later. I rose to my feet and took careful but quick steps across the line and to the far end, where the ledge was much higher. This was not an act likely to be kind to my body.

I plucked one knife from the corset slatting beneath my coat. If Maddie Ruth ever forgot what I did for her this day, I’d deliver a bolloxing so hard, her skull wouldn’t stop ringing for a fortnight. Clenching my teeth, I cut the end of the rope I stood upon. My stomach left its usual haunts to launch into my throat as the support dropped out from beneath me.

Allez hop, I thought wildly, because that, too, was a kind of habit, and one I relied upon to focus myself.

I grasped the rope, swung across the alley and slammed hard into the wall. My palms burned with the effort; flesh tore under the rough, twisted hemp. That would scar, I was sure of it. Rope abrasions were never gentle.

Nothing for it, now.

Agile as an African monkey, I climbed up the rope, hissing as my hands twitched, and over the ledge. “Maddie Ruth!”